


to memory now (i can’t recall)

by bygoneboy



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Genderfluid Character, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Mild Sexual Content, Other, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 11:37:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11485602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bygoneboy/pseuds/bygoneboy
Summary: “Come off it, mate, there’s no shortage of treasures round these parts-- surely a man can find something he fancies.”“Aye,” says Kidd, “surely. As long as he’s willing to look.”





	to memory now (i can’t recall)

**Author's Note:**

> taking a quick break from me:a to replay AC4, and ffs...if ubisoft can write mary read as an assassin, i can write her as a gender-fluid bisexual
> 
> uhhhh general warning for edward being [initially] less than understanding about gender and sexuality (he gets over it quick tho, i'm not about that life)

 

* * *

  _[APRIL 1721]_

* * *

 

He bears her body to the boat at the ocean edge, her soft head against his chest. She isn’t cold yet, just heavy and too-still. Anne weeps when she sees her, hands outstretched and trembling and reaching; she scrambles to her side as Edward lays her across the stern seat, raking her fingers in desperate paths through her hair, over her closed eyes.

 

He had escaped his cage only to find the very same bars tightened round his chest. He had been warned that this day would come-- not only to him but to them all, to Thatch and Hornigold, to Nassau itself. It had seemed such an empty threat, then, and one made a long time ago. All but forgotten to him.

 

So long ago.

 

There’s the taste of blood in his mouth, copper-thick. His lungs have a weight to them, made iron-heavy. From the boat Anne cries out again, not in misery this time but in pain, doubled over Mary’s body, and Edward stares at the high prison walls, afraid to look back. Afraid to speak, sure beyond certainty that his voice will fail him, and break.

 

The knife in his heart twists deeper. Tasting blood, still tasting blood-- he wonders, a moment, whether he will ever recognize the taste of anything else.

 

“What will you do now?” Ah Tabai asks, as though there is a _now,_ an _after._

 

“Nothing sensible,” Edward answers, and turns away.

* * *

_[SEPTEMBER 1715]_  

* * *

 

Nassau harbors its fair share of sin. Of freedom to its fault, and men drowning in the echoes of their misdeeds. But if Thatch is their Devil in disguise, Edward thinks, James Kidd is the angel next in line to fall.

 

They’re sauced, the both of them-- perhaps Edward, more so. His arm is slung around Kidd’s shoulders, staggering home to the Jackdaw after a night well-spent; it’s been less than a month since he’d claimed the Spanish ship as his own, and his crew’s celebration is beginning to wind down at long last. They’ll sail, soon. To the waters of Havana, perhaps, or Long Island. Doing as they please, living as they please. Taking whatever they want.

 

They sway, together and alone, through the black midnight alleys. The buzz of the crowd is far off from where they’ve wandered. “Have you set sights on a prize?” Kidd asks, thoughtful-like.

 

“Not yet,” Edward says, leaning heavily against him with a fair share of cheer. “Not apart from the Observatory, that is.”

 

“Your men won’t be keen on chasing naught but a fairy tale.”

 

“Come off it, mate, there’s no shortage of treasures round these parts-- surely a man can find something he fancies.”

 

“Aye,” says Kidd, “surely. As long as he’s willing to look.”

 

They’ve slowed to a stop; Kidd's breath is hot at Edward’s throat. Edward’s head is on his shoulder, resting there, content--

 

And they’re close enough that when Kidd turns his head, their lips align.

 

It doesn’t last. Edward startles back with his eyes wide, searching Kidd’s face, finding nothing remotely akin to guilt. “Jesus,” he says, everything going a little sideways, his voice suddenly very hoarse. “The fuck are you-- the fuck, Jim.”

 

Kidd has one hand on the back of his neck. The other is resting, fingers curled, in his hair. He’s steered him back against the alley wall, although Edward doesn’t remember that happening--

 

“The fuck,” says Edward again, softly.

 

This time he kisses him, proper.

 

It isn’t much different than kissing a woman, really. The same push-pull of sharing breath, trading touches. The same feeling of missing a step and inviting the fall, arousal spiking like the snap of a tether. Kidd fits one slim thigh between Edward’s legs, moving against him in a steady rhythm; Edward’s hands tighten at Kidd’s shoulders, slumped back boneless against the wall.

 

His breath comes sharp and quick in his throat. He feels lightheaded, wonderfully seduced, biting hard at the inside of his cheek to keep himself from grinding down against Kidd like a needy tavern whore, “Jim, for the love of Christ-- how old are you, anyhow?”

 

“Twenty-nine,” says Kidd, easily, having replaced the blissful weight of his thigh with his hand, squeezing at the shape of him. There’s no hint of a lie midst his expression, though he _must_ be lying, what with the smoothness of his jaw, and the gravel-high pitch of his voice. At Edward’s best guess he’s twenty, maybe. Twenty-one at most. “Does it matter, much?” Kidd adds, his fingers caught in the laces of his trousers. “I’d wager these are coming off, either way.”

                                                                                                     

“You seem awfully sure about that.”

 

“Tell me no, then.” He goes to his knees, waiting. “Tell me no.”

 

Edward considers it, briefly. Walking away, and pretending none of this has ever happened. Kidd would hardly hold it against him, he isn’t the sort for blackmail. But of course that would mean _walking away--_ from _this,_ the tightness of his breeches and the ache in his hips, Kidd running teasing fingers along the line of his cock, smile gleaming in the dark.

 

The harlots lining the street charge coin for as long as it takes to bring a man off; Jim is offering it for free. And Edward won’t find anything this inviting once he takes to the sea again-- months on open ocean with naught but his own hand.

 

“Aw, hell,” he says, and closes his eyes. “Go on.”

 

After all--

 

It isn’t as if it’ll ever happen again.

 

* * *

_[MAY 1717]_

* * *

 

It happens again.

 

The next time they make port in Nassau-- the sun hasn’t made a full cycle before Jim has him sweating and cursing before him, biting into his mouth. And it happens a third time after that, and goes on to happen--

 

Until it is less of an outlier, and instead a fixed point, a constant.

 

It isn’t love, or even love-making, what they do: so often rushed, or heated. Or in the midst of an argument, Kidd scolding him for his single-minded greed, his gluttony, tempered words soothed only by the stroke of his hand around him, the gentle way he takes Edward apart. He keeps his clothes on, all of them and always, down to the shine of his boots-- it’s Edward who’s left with his pants pooled around his ankles, chest heaving, knees weak, ruined by whatever means Kidd has taken to ruin him.

 

That Kidd chooses to provide pleasure, while asking for none in return-- it shouldn’t bother him, not in the slightest. And it doesn’t.

 

Not at first, anyway.

 

But he can't help being the curious sort, can he?

 

He finds himself wondering if perhaps what James wants is something beyond what he’s able to give. Or whether it’s possible that James finds no satisfaction in the act at all. But both possibilities seem unlikely-- Edward has never given himself to another man like this, but be that as it may, he’s well-endowed where it counts. And he’s not a complete fool, whatever Jim thinks-- he sees the way Kidd looks at him, dark-eyed. The way his breath quickens, shoving Edward into shadowed corners, down against the chart table of the Jackdaw’s captain’s quarters. How his eyes flutter closed, pleasured-like, when he uses his mouth on Edward: tongue and lips and his own hand, slipping down the front of his pants, moving in a messy, desperate rhythm there.

 

It isn’t love. Or at least it is not the kind of love he’s accustomed to, the kind born of sunny romance and the tenderness of a man’s heart. Whatever they have has grown partially out of necessity, partially out of convenience. They are allies first and foremost, and whatever deviance may follow does nothing to counter that.

 

But it is familiar.

 

Up until winter melts into spring, and James Kidd melts into someone else altogether.

 

Laurens Prins dies, bleeding out like a pig at Edward’s hand. He gets his coin, the Brotherhood gets their kill-- and when the matter is through, two bottles in and sprawled on Nassau’s beach:

 

Maybe Mary Read was a mistake, Edward thinks, a blunder, on God’s part of things. Maybe in the charting of her soul, His Heavenly Father stumbled, put in too much of Man, not enough of Woman. And maybe that, this, the Truth, is his penance: for straying too far into wrongful lust, damnation.

 

“God ain’t the sort to make mistakes,” says the bottom of his second bottle, empty now. “You know that well as I do, Kenway.”

 

“You shut your fucking mouth,” says Edward, crossly.

 

“You shut yours,” says the bottle. It sounds very much like Jim. Like Mary. Like whatever demon he’d let onto his ship, into his pants and his bed.

 

His vision is swimming. He tosses the bottle aside, and reaches for another; there’s the press of a boot on his wrist before he can close fingers around it. “Kenway,” says Mary, patiently, looking down at him with her arms crossed. “You can’t drink your way out of this one, mate.”

 

“Nay,” Edward agrees. “But surely I can try.”

 

There’s a pause. The pressure on his wrist lifts. Mary sits down beside him, digging her fingers into the sand. They're thin fingers. Callused, worn at the palms. Hands that’ve done real work, held down wind-wild ropes in the midst of high seas. They don’t seem to belong much to a lady, Edward thinks, taking a long pull. Nor to a man, for that matter.

 

She takes the bottle from him without asking. She takes a pull of her own, head tossed back, throat moving with every swallow. When she sets the bottle down, her fingers nudge Edward’s, and her hand settles there, over the back of his.

 

“You’re thinking yourself round in circles,” she says. “Aren’t you.”

 

“Maybe,” he says, feeling a fool.

 

“It isn’t a wicked thing unless you choose to make it so, Edward.”

 

“Jesus,” he says, fumbling for the bottle again, “maybe.”

 

“D’you still want to fuck?”

 

He looks at her. The scarlet tie is back in her hair, holding it up and away from her high forehead and hollow cheeks. Jim’s blunt humor is in her eyes, in the lift of her brow. His best mate, a true friend, the softness of her mouth the closest thing to a steady home, in this sort of place-- turned so quickly into someone he doesn’t recognize. After all this time-- and bleary, sloshed, and piss-drunk, the lines blur.

 

“I reckon so,” he says.

 

She kisses him, after that. And it doesn’t feel any different than it had before: altogether wild, and unashamed. A little filthy, breath hot and mouths slick; Mary straddles him, shoving him down against the sand. Pulling at his hair, sharply, until Edward bares his throat, and makes the kind of noise he’s likely to forever deny.

 

“You’re beautiful,” he tells her, flat on his back and pinned beneath her, in a way that feels good and right.

 

“Shut it, Kenway--”

 

“You are.”

 

“And when I’ve bound myself up again, what’ll I be then?”

 

He frowns, not having thought that far ahead. Not having thought much at all, the rum too slow and thick in his head, on his tongue. He’ll worry about that later, he decides, reaching up for the buckle of Mary’s belt. He’ll worry about everything later.

 

She laughs at him, deep and throaty. “Restrain yourself, man,” she says, knocking his hands away. “That’s not on the table just yet.”

 

“Tell me what is,” Edward says, voice properly rough, and Mary’s smile, at least, is the same as Jim’s was: sharp like a knife. Like the wicked-thin-edge of the blades fastened round her wrists, sliding one hand between Edward’s legs.

 

“This first,” she says, her grip firm. “Then all the rest of you, should I care to.”

 

It takes her clever fingers driving him to something half-mad; it takes him begging her for it, for what feels like an Era.

 

But in the end, she does, as it happens, _care to._

And she tells him to call her _James,_ when he comes.

 

* * *

  _[AUGUST 1718]_

* * *

 

Sometimes, Edward learns, James is Mary. And sometimes Mary is James, and sometimes James is Kidd and Kidd is neither, really, or both, or just a sliver of everything, the glint of a blade from the high fort wall, a shadow from the corner of his eye, that sharp-sweet smile beneath a sunburned brow.

 

Nothing in Nassau belongs to one man alone. Edward marks the way Mary sweet-talks the merchant traders, chin propped coy-like on her hand; the way Jim winds his fingers around Anne’s slender wrist, and makes her laugh. Whether Rackham has any idea of the latter, Edward doesn’t know-- and isn’t keen on telling him, anyway, the bastard. He sees no reason in upsetting the balance of Kidd’s going-on’s, finds no promise of profit in unmaking the shifting secret Kidd has entrusted him with. The lines blur and now, like the pull of the tide, like the wind catching full sail, he lets it be.

 

Because no matter the company, and no matter whose bed it be in, that secret always seems to nestle its way back to Edward’s side.

 

“Tell me about your wife,” says Kidd, sleepily-- Jim again tonight, lying beside him naked in the cool cabin air, the tie still fixed in his hair, running the blunt-bitten drag of his nails up and down Edward’s forearm.

 

Edward’s ears go hot with shame; were it any other man, he would take offense. But Jim has asked in an honest way, without an ounce of mockery, and Edward is inclined to believe that he does care to know. “Her name is Caroline,” he says, at last, unsure how to begin. “The daughter of a wealthy man, when I met her first.”

 

“Is that what you married her for?”

 

He shakes his head, slightly, staring up at the plank-board ceiling, feeling the ship sway and pitch beneath them. “She spoke her mind. I noticed that, first-- she had heart, courage, in her way.”

 

It leaves a saddened ache in his chest, to speak of her. He wonders if he would recognize her now, if she passed him in a crowd. She surely wouldn’t know him for the man he’s become; he had likely never really known her, either.

 

“I was married, once,” says James.

 

“What?” says Edward, stunned out of his own thoughts. Jim has a way of doing that, of surprising him, even after all this time, "You-- really?”

 

“Met him in the Navy.” He’s enjoying this, clearly, grinning up at Edward’s expression. “Love of my fucking life, I thought.”

 

“What happened?”

 

“Disease. Made fairly quick work of him not three weeks after the wedding.”

 

“Jesus,” says Edward, more softly, “mate, I’m sorry.”

 

Jim shrugs, off-handedly, connecting all the little browned freckles dotted up Edward’s bicep with the pad of his thumb, slowing over the thick lines of black ink etched into his skin. “It was years ago, now. Besides, I never would’ve joined Ah Tabai, if he hadn’t passed. Never would’ve done so many things...it was almost too easy, going back to James-- I like being James, Edward.”

 

Edward knows. Even if he doesn’t quite understand. It’s hardly the strangest thing to him in this world, anymore, what with the Observatory, its Sages and all of its half-dug secrets. What with the Brotherhood and their Creed, fighting for a world he can’t yet imagine, their words masked in riddles he doesn’t yet care to unravel.

 

“When I think back to being Wife,” says Jim, “every day, and given a few months, being Mother-- maybe I would’ve found myself dying, just the same.”

 

He kisses, open-mouthed, at Edward’s shoulder, tracing freckles like stars. “A merry life and a short one,” he says, in the pause before he takes Edward’s chin in his hand, and brings their lips together. “Is that not what they’ll say of us?”

 

* * *

  _[APRIL 1721]_  

* * *

 

In the prison dark Mary is still breathing. In the prison dark Edward is not yet alone. He will drown himself in this moment for years to come but here and now and as it happens, he grips her by the shoulder, and demands that she push on. As if he can force the life back into her, denial of death the last prize he cares to take. The last selfish thing he asks of her, before redemption; the last thing he asks of her, at all.

 

“I’ve done my part,” she says by way of reply, eyes glassy but alight with fever and fire, words half-slurred in the effort. “Will you?”

 

 _It’s too soon,_ he means to say. _I need more time, I don't know you, yet, at least not all of you._ _Don’t leave me,_ _not like Thatch did, like Vane--_

 

_Not you, too._

 

“If you came with me,” he says, instead. “Then I could--” and with a sharper, frantic edge, as she convulses, choking,  _“Mary--”_

 

She smiles up at him, mouth wet with blood and sick. There’s forgiveness there in her face, absolving him of more than he knows; there’s something grateful there too, before it fades, the fire turned to ember, turned to ash.

 

“I’ll be with you, Kenway,” Kidd says; “I will,” says Mary.

 

“What will you do now?” Ah Tabai asks; “Nothing sensible,” he answers, turning away.

 

“Do you feel that too,” Anne asks. “All empty inside, like?”

 

And he does, Devil curse him.

 

He does.

They bury her, properly, when it’s over. Wrapping her in the white-sheet shroud, preparing her for the void beyond the Jackdaw’s wooden world-edge. He looks to the sky, the masts looming above them, the ropes swaying, gently. Feeling sea-water on his cheeks. Tasting salt. Not blood, not anymore.

 

And before he turns her over to the West-Indie waves, before the shroud unravels as she sinks, delivered to the sea’s cradle, Edward holds two sides of the same coin close to his chest, and loves them, loves them desperately, loves them both.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [find me on tumblr](http://bygoneboy.tumblr.com/)


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